Kubernetes, a container orchestration and cloud-native application infrastructure platform, was originally developed by Google but has since become an open-source Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project ever since July 2015. Under the direction of The Linux Foundation, Kubernetes is designed to improve the
automated deployment, scaling and management of containerized
applications.

This week, The Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced the release of Kubernetes 1.11, which provides users with a host of networking, configuration and operational improvements. This latest release marks the second major release for Kubernetes in 2018 and follows the 1.10 milestone that was released back on March 26. With each release, the group seeks to keep pace with the growing interest and demand in the platform.

Among the highlights of Kubernetes 1.11 are two highly-anticipated features making their way to general availability: IPVS-based In-Cluster Load Balancing and CoreDNS as a cluster DNS add-on option, which means increased scalability and flexibility for production applications. On top of that, Custom Resource Definition gets a boost with new versioning capabilities aimed at easing operations. And Kubernetes nodes, known as "Kubelets," now benefit from a new dynamic configuration capability to be rolled out in a live cluster.

According to the team:

Today’s release continues to advance maturity, scalability, and flexibility of Kubernetes, marking significant progress on features that the team has been hard at work on over the last year. This newest version graduates key features in networking, opens up two major features from SIG-API Machinery and SIG-Node for beta testing, and continues to enhance storage features that have been a focal point of the past two releases. The features in this release make it increasingly possible to plug any infrastructure, cloud or on-premise, into the Kubernetes system.

With the 1.11 release:

"IPVS (IP Virtual Server) provides high-performance in-kernel load balancing, with a simpler programming interface than iptables," the team said in a statement. "This change delivers better network throughput, better programming latency, and higher scalability limits for the cluster-wide distributed load-balancer that comprises the Kubernetes Service model."

CoreDNS, meanwhile, provides a flexible, extensible authoritative DNS server and directly integrates with the Kubernetes API. The team added, "CoreDNS has fewer moving parts than the previous DNS server, since it's a single executable and a single process, and supports flexible use cases by creating custom DNS entries. It's also written in Go making it memory-safe."

Kubelet Configuration has moved to Beta. Kubelets can be configured via command-line flags, making it difficult to update Kubelet configurations in a running cluster. With this beta feature, users are able to configure Kubelets in a live cluster via the API server.

The team also highlighted several storage enhancements, including improvements to the Container Storage Interface (CSI), which has been a major topic over the last few releases. Other new storage functionality includes support for online resizing of Persistent Volumes and for dynamic maximum volume count, both of which are being introduced as alpha features.

"As the Kubernetes community has grown, our release process represents an amazing demonstration of collaboration in open source software development," said a member of the release team. "Kubernetes continues to gain new users at a rapid clip. This growth creates a positive feedback cycle where more contributors commit code creating a more vibrant ecosystem. Kubernetes has over 20,000 individual contributors to date and an active community of more than 40,000 people."